


The Texture of Time

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work
Genre: Breakup, Diary/Journal, F/M, Letters, Life - Freeform, Poetry, Slice of Life, i will post some of the things i write here now because i want to be seen but not known, my feelings stir up a storm inside me and i think too much, thanks for coming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:14:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27165730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: even imagining saying 'i love you' feels like crawling into the mouth of a cannon and shooting myself out into...god knows where. just fire, fire on all sides of me, the anticipation and the calm of the darkness just before the first spark, the spark that will erupt everything around me, everything, into flames, and up,up,up,and away.
Kudos: 1
Collections: Anonymous





	The Texture of Time

Chapter I. October 23rd, 2020. 

I can't even remember the last time I saw you. 

* * *

“If I think of you once, you don’t leave my head for hours. You hover around my like a ghost, just behind my periphery and sometimes when I turn around it feels like my heart saw you there, just for a second. The outline of where you weren’t sears into me. 

When someone mentions your name, you walk into my mind and sit down. You smile at me, your stupid face glows at me, and I start joking around with you. I love having you near me. It was only your name that was mentioned, but somehow it was a curse, a spell, something that summoned every part of you, all but for your body. I can hear your voice echoing in my head. I haven’t heard you in months, this shouldn’t make sense. Why is your voice a record burned into my mind? I’m not sure I want it here anymore. 

You sit like a Frankenstein’s monster within me, and your name voiced aloud is the thunderstorm of electric shocks sending you into motion. Havoc, torrential downpour, your smiling face, the dark wood colour of your laugh. 

One shock of lighting lasts for days. You’re like a dead god, crudely animated by the hands of a puppeteer, dancing mockingly around my mind. Every mention of your name sends a jerk to all the strings holding you up, and your smile widens.

Your name appears on my phone. 

I reply. 

I always reply.

Worse, you talk to me. Actually talk. 

I reply, and I breathe life into the monsters mouth himself, as if I leaned down and kissed him with my own trembling warm lips, and cracked the iced encasing of his body. 

The encasing I'd spent months crafting. The encasing of time and dust. 

Neural networks, in your shape, thinned from misuse. 

I reply, and the shocks jolt along my neurons with such fervour that I am surprised they are not torn to shreds, 

But no. 

The encasing of time insulating them cracks too, and the flood continues. The apocalypse began a long time ago. 

And this time it really is all of you, all but for your body. 

Even the weight of it is here, I swear my bed dips lower on one side, a strange shadow is cast on my pillow. The shadow of your hair fanning across my pillows.

I wake up, and you’re the first thing that’s there. I open my eyes, and for a second, I see yours. 

I don’t even have the energy to startle. For a moment, I don’t even notice, I’m still melted into my sheets like butter, soft and pliable from sleep and the non-sight of you next to me is just another softness to the bed. 

It hurts later though. 

Have you ever hurt yourself, fallen maybe, and you land with a deep thunk in your bones, and the vague sensation of gravel crawling into the soft skin of your knees meets you, yet the pain isn’t there yet? 

There are little sharp rocks under your skin, they’ve cut their way through, _in_ , roughly and carelessly and a little ugly, 

But you can’t feel it yet.

For a brief moment, you only have your hyper-conscious mind telling you in a too-calm voice, ‘ _this is going to hurt. we need to move now, because this is going to hurt_.’ 

And every second is slow, time has melted around your skin all over you. The order of seconds has been shaken up by the hardness of the fall and the forgotten solidity of the earth, and time itself is scrambling to right itself alongside you. Those few seconds are all that you have before you know you’ll have the wind knocked out of you with the pain. 

If you’ve moved from where you fell in the middle of the road to sit on the curb then you’re lucky. 

You’re lucky until the pain hits you anyway, and you don’t think it would’ve mattered if you were still in the middle of the street, or in the middle of an eight lane highway or an ocean or in the centre of the sun, because pain is pain is pain. 

It’s a truck hitting you, but from the inside, and for once every little neuron in your brain agrees on one thing: pain. 

But remember just before that, we had those seconds in the soft cushion of time, before being pulled under the wave. 

Well, I wake up, and the ghost of your eyelashes flits over me, your warmth feeling like it’s still lingering, like maybe you’ve only just left, you’re about to come back, the heaviness of your knees and the lazy snaking of your arms

It’s all in that little cushion of time, so quiet, so safe. 

Your light pink and brown lips are dry from sleep, as if they’re about to move and make a sound, and I wonder what you'll say. 

And you know, it’s funny how long it takes for it to hit. 

Because this one doesn’t hit like a bus, this one is like you’re the frog in the pot and the temperature is growing, maybe I’m plastered to the front of a train that’s slowly accelerating and it takes me a really long time to realize it, 

And when I do, 

I am small and I am helpless and gravity keeps growing and growing and soon enough, too soon, it feels like my bones are being crushed, the acceleration enough to make it feel like I’m the pinpoint between comets meeting head on, having raced towards one another for billions of years, from opposite sides of the universe. 

It feels just a little bit like I am going to die. 

Somehow I’m still breathing, I’m still moving and eating and thinking and doing, bones only so so quietly splintering under the weight of it one at a time. And some of them don’t even hurt, you know. 

And I’m breathing. And you’re sitting there in my mind, smiling at me. 

Your name is in the air. 

Your name is on my screen. 

My fingers tap out a response, I hit send, I laugh. 

I await your response. A bone breaks somewhere, unmapped. 

* * *

I am so scared to look at you. I never want to look at you. I know I will have to one day. But I fear that each time I look at you, it gets harder to look away. 

What if, one day, I will look at you, and never be able to look away. 

What then? 

I will be bonedust then, my beloved."


End file.
